The only love I’ve ever known that isn’t familial is that of my friends. At the geriatric age of 21, I’ve yet to hold hands in a manner that isn’t platonic. I’ve never succumbed to the urge to text someone to say I wanted to see them again after a first date because I’ve never been on one to begin with. What I’m getting at is that I’ve never felt the need to yearn for anything more, to search for love in a romantic context, because what I’ve felt from my friends had always been more than enough to fill my cup.
In the finale of “Sex in the City,” one that was expected and ends with Carrie and Big giving their romance their umpteenth chance, Big tells Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha, “You three know her better than anyone. You’re the loves of her life. And a guy’s just lucky to come in fourth.” I was a senior in high school when I watched this scene for the first time, and nothing had ever resonated more. This was before I knew that sometimes, growing up means growing apart.
Spontaneous coffee dates became obligatory birthday dinners, scheduled only for those who were born on days that landed within our colleges’ winter breaks. They double as a means for catching up, for debriefing what we haven’t seen of one another on Instagram stories and posts. At our most recent ones, post-grad plans were our default topic of conversation, though often briefly interrupted by relationship updates and prospects (needless to say, my contributions were lacking).
Those of us who are taken — which is all but three — were alarmingly eager to talk about marriage and children. I write “alarmingly,” not because the thought of being old enough to do so scares me but because I found it difficult to think about my friends in that context. I realized that, in the case of the majority of them, I didn’t know the most recent versions of themselves, nor them me.
The milestones, contrary to popular belief, aren’t as important because, like I said earlier, that’s the stuff you can see on social media. It’s the personal mundanities you don’t get to hear about — the class they dreaded (and the grade that suffered as a result), internship and roommate drama, the chaos of almost missing their flight home for summer break — those are what hurt the most. Those are the things I miss.
I had a friend who would revive one of our group chats biannually to propose a meetup we’d promised to each other back in our earliest days of high school, like when we vowed to have a bar day as soon as the last of us turned 21. It made me feel sort of like a time capsule, buried and forgotten, only to be remembered thanks to the craving of nostalgia. “But if all we are to one another is the past,” I thought to myself, “that means there isn’t much hope for us having a future together at all.”
Full transparency, I’d initially set out to write about friendship breakups — that is, until I realized I hadn’t actually been through one. The demise of the ones I reference here were never formally addressed. Their remnants just sort of dissipated, and I hadn’t prepared myself to save them. I didn’t know I was holding them like water in my hands, and I have a feeling that if you asked them, they’d say the same.
My best friend and I, both members of this group, have confirmed these feelings with one another. One night, I asked her, “When do you call time of death?” What I meant by that, of course, was, “When is it OK to call it quits, to say you’ve tried your best and moved on?”
To say I’m faultless in all of this would be a lie. To say there’s any fault to be assigned at all, really, would be a lie, too. Everything I know about love, I’ve learned from these people — and none of it has been lost, not really; it’s just stagnant now. Not growing, but not lessening either.
When I miss them, us, or more accurately, what we used to be, I sit on the floor of my childhood bedroom and reread cards from birthdays past: evidence of their love for me, of their intimate understanding of who I am — or was — as a person. Because sometimes, after calling time of death, all you can really do is visit the cemetery every once in a while.
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